A “metatag,” referred to herein as a “tag,” is a keyword or descriptive term associated with an item as means of classification. Tags are typically used in the metadata of items such as computer files, web pages, digital images, and internet bookmarks. In a typical web page, for example, the page creator adds one or more tags associated with the web page contents. A web page displaying vacation photos from Europe might have tags such as “Europe,” “vacation,” “Paris,” and “pictures.” Once the web page is published on the Internet, an automated classification system, such as GOOGLE, may index the web page using the tags as search terms. The indexing software will provide links to the web page based on the keyword tag. Some web-based search engines and classification systems specialize in specific content. FLICKR (www.flickr.com) is a popular digital photo sharing website that allows users to search photographs by keyword. These specialized websites amass collections of tags, allowing for multiple “browseable paths” for accessing the web page contents. Browseable paths are generated by the results of a keyword search. For example, if a web user wants to find a picture of buildings in Paris, the user can go to FLICKR and search for images that users have tagged with the words “Paris” and “buildings.” FLICKR generates a list of links to indexed pictures of buildings in Paris.
A “tag cloud” is a visual depiction of tags and tag attributes. One widely known tag cloud appears on FLICKR. Tag clouds have been popularized by TECHNORATI, an Internet search engine used for searching blogs. In the most common form, tag clouds display popular tags (frequently used tags) in a larger font while listing the tags in alphabetical order. Thus, manually searching tags by both name and popularity is possible. Usually, the web user has an option to sort the list by popularity—which will put the largest text tags at the top of the list, and the smallest at the end of the list. Selecting a single tag from a tag cloud by clicking on the tag with a mouse pointer leads the user to a collection of web pages or other items associated with that tag.
FIG. 1. shows an exemplary Internet browser 100 displaying tag cloud 110. Tag cloud 110 lists a series of tags in alphabetical order. Popular tags are displayed with a larger font, and less popular tags are displayed in a smaller font. Legend 120 explains the sort criteria and tag attributes used by the tag cloud. Clicking on the underlined “popularity” hyperlink in legend 120 sorts the tag cloud by popularity.
Tag clouds have evolved to display multiple tag attributes at the same time. Tag clouds use colors or other display characteristics in addition to font size for indicating tag attributes. For example, different colors can indicate how recently an item related to the tag has been updated, where red tags represent recently updated items, and blue tags represent older items. “Hover effects” have been added to tag clouds, including highlighting a tag under a mouse pointer, and displaying the corresponding URL or a comment related to the tag in a “mouse-over tool-tip.” Mouse-over tool-tips are small pop-up windows that appear when a mouse pointer hovers over an active region of a window, and that generally display information related to the active region. Although these enhancements increase the amount of information communicated by a tag cloud, only the creator of the tag cloud has control over the displayed tag attributes. At most, users can only change the sort criteria from an alphabetical tag attribute to another displayed tag attribute such as most popular or most recently updated.
A need exists for method of allowing tag cloud users to select preferred tag attributes and customize how the tag attributes are displayed. These and other objects of the invention will be apparent to those skilled in the art from the following detailed description of a preferred embodiment of the invention.